Exploring Economic Returns Across Rural-Serving Colleges

The authors explore the characteristics of rural-serving institutions (RSIs), and the relationship between rural-servingness of the institution and the subsequent earnings of its students, as well as the relationship between rural-servingness of the institution and a set of equitable value thresholds. They observe that the average RSI and high-RSI college is less selective and several thousand dollars cheaper than the average non-RSI. Additionally, the average time to degree is generally lower at these institutions. The authors find the RSIs are accessible, affordable, and offer a timely route to a degree, performing comparably to (and sometimes better than) non-RSIs. They also observe that rural-servingness is a statistically significant negative predictor of earnings (p<.001) after controlling for institutional and county-level characteristics, although the effect is small.